Bluesky April 2026 Outage Post-Mortem (pckt.blog)

by jcalabro 79 comments 141 points
Read article View on HN

79 comments

[−] threecheese 35d ago

> What I had missed is that we deployed a new internal service last week that sent less than three GetPostRecord requests per second, but it did sometimes send batches of 15-20 thousand URIs at a time. Typically, we'd probably be doing between 1-50 post lookups per request.

That’ll do it.

[−] pembrook 35d ago
Distributed social media goes down? hrmmm.

Email and the internet don't have "downtime." Certain key infra providers do of course. ISPs can go down. DNS providers can go down. But the internet and email itself can't go down absent a global electricity outage.

You haven't built a decentralized network until you reach that standard imo. Otherwise its just "distributed protocol" cosplay. Nice costume. Kind of like how everybody has been amnesia'd into thinking Obsidian is open source when it really isn't.

[−] tapoxi 35d ago
I don't really understand this architecture, but I thought Bluesky was distributed like Mastodon? How can it have an outage?
[−] opem 35d ago
At least they aren't hiding and transparent about it unlike the big tech corps with so called SLAs
[−] mwkaufma 35d ago
Tell us more about this buggy "new internal service" that's scraping batch data :P
[−] heliumtera 34d ago
Good to know the discussion about decentralization and federation had finally ended
[−] goekjclo 35d ago

> The timing of these log spikes lined up with drops in user-facing traffic, which makes sense. Our data plane heavily uses memcached to keep load off our main Scylla database, and if we're exhausting ports, that's a huge problem.

I expect this is common.

[−] jonstaab 35d ago
nostr never goes down
[−] gsibble 35d ago
Did all 3 users notice?
[−] mwagstaff 35d ago
With my SRE hat on, dare I ask... could/should this have been picked up in testing?

And then normally there's a nice discussion about how production is very different to the test environment.

[−] dogemaster2027 35d ago
[dead]
[−] templar_snow 35d ago
[flagged]
[−] rvz 35d ago
Thank you for the post mortem on this outage.
[−] electrondood 35d ago
Great write up... curious about the RCA. Thanks!
[−] drewg123 35d ago
Golang's use of a potentially unbounded number of threads is just insane. I used to be fairly bullish on golang, but this, combined with the fact that its garbage collected, makes me feel its just unsuitable for production use.
[−] streetfighter64 35d ago

> They represent real user-facing downtime

Off-topic, but "real" feels like the new "delve". Is there such a thing as "fake" or "virtual" downtime, or why do people feel the need to specify that all manner of things are "real" nowadays?

[−] jmclnx 35d ago
Lite Blue on a dark Blue background. That is a new one, I have seen grey text on lite grey, but blue on blue ?

The article does work in lynx, at least I can read it.